Left-to-right, Yamiche Alcindor of The New York Times, UW-Madison Professor of Sociology Mike Massoglia, and Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm.
For New York Times reporter Yamiche Alcindor, conversations around mass incarceration in the United States rarely make it past the incarcerated.
“There is all the community left behind, the women who are raising children without fathers, the siblings left behind, the grandparents that are doing double duty at age 80 to provide for their families,” Alcindor said at a criminal justice panel discussion at the Pyle Center Feb. 21.
But given the results of the November election, getting to the root of mass incarceration could not be more pressing, said Alcindor and the other two panelists, UW-Madison sociology professor Mike Massoglia and Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm.
Alcindor, who grew up in Miami — the type of place wrought with racial injustice that she would come to report on throughout her journalism career — recently chronicled some of the lives touched by police killings for the Times: Tamir Rice’s teenage sister, Oscar Grant’s 5-year-old daughter and the 9-year-old nephew of Sandra Bland.
As a reporter, Alcindor said she’s particularly interested in who will end up benefiting from a president who ran on a ticket of law and order to address a crime wave she argues was never there to begin with.
Massoglia said he fears the election of President Donald Trump will likely derail federal initiatives aimed at reducing disproportionate rates of black incarceration, including those that exist in Madison and Dane County.
“There are some alternatives to incarceration,” Massoglia said. “[But] we lack as much political will as we do science.”
Chisholm is a bit more optimistic, arguing that it is a promising time to analyze and reevaluate a broken criminal justice system.
People on both sides of the political aisle, he says, can understand that it’s a system that’s not sustainable, and that only exacerbates the cycle of criminality by expecting police officers and arrests to be the solution to conditions of violence, poverty and mental illness. He says the true solution lies in treating these issues from a public health approach.
All three of the panelists offered small changes that could begin to turn the tide on mass incarceration.
Chisholm proposed more drug treatment programs and law enforcement-led diversion, where officers address low risk offenders on an individual basis instead of immediately entering them into the criminal justice system.
Alcindor cited a recent push for more African American prosecutors and district attorneys.
Massoglia questioned whether certain criminal records should remain public for employers to view, and argued that the corrections system should begin offering more vocational training for prisoners so that, upon their release back into the community, they will more likely obtain a steady income.
“Education is good, but a GED from Dodge Maximum Security Prison isn’t going to mean as much as a welding certificate,” Massoglia said.
For Alcindor, beginning to address mass incarceration will require a cold, hard look at America’s troubled past with issues of race and criminalization.
“So much of this is how we see other people, and how these communities are policed,” said Alcindor. “There are [likely] more African American men in prison right now than were held in slavery. We think of [alternative methods of justice] as un-American, but we need to think about how we got here in the first place.”
